Chris Hansen Correspondent • Profile

Dana: My iPod was given to me as a Christmas gift, and it was stolen right out of my college dorm room…

Joe: Back in January, my apartment got broken into. The only things they stole were my iPod and digital camera.

Jessica: After school, I looked through my purse to see if I could listen to my iPod and it wasn't there.

Jeff: They didn't actually take anything else out of the car, just the iPod.

Frustrated iPod owners are angry, their music taken from them by thieves Dateline caught on hidden camera.

On Dateline Wednesday, Dateline investigates if it's possible, using some of the same high-tech capabilities that make the iPod the phenomenon it is, to track down people who take iPods that don't belong to them.

The iPod -- it's everywhere. Originally billed as "a thousand songs in your pocket," it can now hold up to 20,000 songs, 100 hours of video, 25,000 photos--and with a staggering 110 million sold, the device has become an international icon and in an indispensable part of life.

But as you've just heard--if you've got to have it, so do thieves.

In Los Angeles, robberies of iPods and other gadgets shot up 34 percent last year.

In San Francisco, iPod robberies nearly doubled.

The crime wave has led to some schools across the country banning iPods!

Even Apple admits the problem is serious, sometimes leading to injuries of iPod owners, in once case in New York City, even tragedy.

WEEKEND TODAY

A TEENAGER..MURDERED OVER AN IPOD. TWO SUSPECTS IN CUSTODY..

The theft is so common, thieves have led to a new term: i-Jacking.

Det. Richard Kenney, NYPD: I've had hundreds of investigations that involved iPods at one point in time.

Richard Kenney is a New York City Police Department Burglary Detective.

Kenney: This is a problem all over the United States.

Chris Hansen, Dateline correspondent: Have you talked to other detectives in other cities?

Kenney: It's basically the same all over. People are stealing iPods. And detectives have additional work on their desks.

We met the detective when a Dateline senior producer's son had his iPod stolen.

And we wondered, since the iPod is such a high-tech marvel capable of communicating with a central database each time it's plugged into a computer -- if an iPod went missing, maybe there was some way to find it.

Alain Ferry wondered the same thing when he lost his girlfriends’ iPod.

Hansen: And what did you say to your girlfriend?

Alain Ferry: I didn't say anything. I didn't tell her, I was like, I'll find the damn thing.

But how? Would there actually be a way to track down stolen or missing iPods?

If you own an iPod, you already know that when you first buy it, you plug it into your computer and register it with Apple. Apple files the iPod's serial number and requests personal information like your name and address.

Then, each time you want to download or purchase a song online from iTunes, your computer communicates with a central database at Apple. If you buy a song, Apple requests credit card information.

And it's because of all that identifying information that some consumers are convinced iPods can be tracked if they're lost or stolen.

Since Apple is in the best position to track iPods, we called the company to see if it would work with us on a story that set out to answer whether a stolen iPod could be traced.

Apple declined.

That left us with one option.

We'd have try to track down some missing iPods ourselves.  Track them down, using the same kind of information Apple might have at its disposal.

We had one overburdened detective in our corner.

Hansen: Do you think thieves take things because they know there's a lower risk of being caught?

Kenney: Absolutely. I think that anyone who knows that they will be not caught is more likely to commit that crime.

And if we could show it's possible to track down iPods, it might give at least some thieves second thoughts about taking them.

One iPod we tracked was taken. It would disappear on the streets of Santa Monica.

Can we find the thief and the iPod? We're about to find out.

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